Here’s a snapshot (literally) from my recent workshop in South Dakota. My students and I had returned from our early-morning shoot and were walking to town to grab some breakfast. This old motel was on the corner and had a vintage style, so I grabbed a quick shot with my Nikon 1 V1 camera and 10mm lens. Read on to see how I processed this file.
The original shot, taken in bright mid-day light, wasn’t very interesting, so I decided to have a little fun with it. I did very basic RAW conversion in Capture NX 2, and then exported a TIFF to Photoshop CS6 (which I just upgraded to, by the way). Once I was in Photoshop, I got to work.
I wanted to give the image a vintage feel, so I went into Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.0 and applied the Film Efex: Vintage filter. I chose preset style #14 and then I decided to remove the default vignette effect by setting the Vignette slider to 0.
Once I got the old film effect, I dragged a cool Flypaper Texture into the image window in Photoshop. This put the texture into a new layer, and I resized the texture image to fit over the image by dragging the corners. The last step was to set the layer blending mode to “Overlay,” which allowed the underlying image to show through.
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I love the picture! I have actually stayed at this motel in years past. I don’t know if it is still there but there used to be a tombstone in the fountain! I know it was there two years ago. I was told that the original owner’s daughter was playing in the fountain in the 50’s I believe. She supposedly fell, hit her head and drowned so the family put a headstone there. Might be a big lie but I do know the dates on the headstone indicated a girl of age 8. I would love to see someone buy the place and fix it up. I will be going there in a week so I will make sure I look in the fountain! Thanks again for the wonderful picture. It brought back a lot of memories for me.